Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

Magic has universal appeal. I don't believe in magic in the way that I describe in my books, but I'd love it to be real.

One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.